Hi,
I have taken the responsibility for implementing ITIL in our company. So far, we have made considerable progress but an interesting challenge has surfaced. How do we create or sustain awareness of ITIL? What are others doing in their companies to make every staff aware of ITIL? Are you doing something along the lines of putting up posters on ITIL, running competitions etc. I would like to know how this is being driven in your organisation to keep the momentum going. I look forward on hearing from you soon.

In my organization, we have been relying on providing traning sessions to different groups. This has largely helped, as many of these groups would have to respond to RFPs which insist on ITIL background. Thus, this is a more reactive way of sustaining the awareness in the company.

For the ITIL we have not iniated any posters. However, for the Security aspects such as BS7799 etc there are enormous no. of posters near the cafeteria, lifts, work areas etc to bring about awareness among staff.

I would be interested to know more on what others have done in their company to bring about the awareness sessions.

We have built long term awareness campaigns: from one-on-one mentoring, to mass marketing and education, training, certification, brown-bag lunches, posters, newsletters, etc. We have made it policy and begun to set enforcement expectation around its use. Another approach we take is to talk about customers as the reason "why we exist" and Service Management is "what we do". It is not the other thing on top of our days jobs; it is our day jobs. In other words we are interweaving it through a variety of means into the culture.

We are also in the beginning phases of an ITIL implementation and have found staff's wantingness to adopt the new processes and framework to be be somewhat lacking.

To combat this, we have put in place a couple of strategies. There is not enough room in these forums to discuss in detail but here are some high level strategies we have adopted.

1. All staff IT staff (about 50) have attended or will attend either the 3 day foundations course or a one day overview. The training is invaluable when trying to "convert" staff as this is the best way to educate them.

2. We have built an internal ITIL Portal off our intranet where people can access articles, links, forums etc. The take up to this has been slow but we are gaining momentum as the project continues to proceed.

3. Provide staff with regular updates on the progress of the project whether it be by e-mail, newsflashes or verbally.

4. Most importantly, keep your staff involved. Hold workshops, go have a chat to them at their desks about ITIL. Make sure that you listen to them and credit them when implementing their ideas.

These are just some of the waya we have tried to ensure that our staff are motivated about ITIL and believe in the project.

We introduced it by stealth... we didn't talk about ITIL but just slowly introduced the concepts and new initiatives and began restructring our services to the business accordingly. Many times I've seen a wall go up from the business when they see "yet IT another initiative". After a time a few people cottoned on and we heard... "this process is very similar to ITIL".

The other thing is that ITIL is non-presecriptive so to say "we are implementing ITIL" can sometimes set up an unreasonable expectation.